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[Mr. Svinlesha]

First, thanks again for all the help and practical advice y'all have offered so far.  (By the way, Puck, you're tip on digging a pit turned out to be golden.  Muchos gracious, and huevos rancheros.)

Now I seem to have a new problem.  It started, I think, when I accidentally forgot to set the barrel limit on my seed stockpile to zero.  I hate it when I do that.  So suddenly I look over and there's a barrel with all my seed bags stuck in it.

So I remove the old stockpile and redesign a new one, careful to set the barrel limit to zero this time.  And my stupid dwarves respond by filling it with single seeds.  So I remove it, and start a new one again.  Only I forget to set the barrel limit to zero.  And so on.  In other words, I've had my dwarves shuffle my seeds around a few times.  Now I have a couple of seed barrels as well as a stockpile with seed bags.  I keep hoping that eventually some creative dorf will eventually even take the bags out of the barrels and put them on the stockpile, but that seems to be a bit above everyone's pay grade.

The problem was that if I hit Q-s and looked at a farm plot, towards the end of fall, several of my crops (Quarry bushes, Cave Wheat, and Pig Tails) were in red text.  And I noticed my crops weren't being planted, despite having much available seed of all types.  In the Stocks screen, all the seed was listed and available (nothing in red).  It's moved on into winter now, before I had time to post a question, but I'm worried about what will happen next spring.

Anybody out there have an explanation for this strange behavior?

[Random832]

Crops show up in red when there's not enough time for them to grow before they're out of season.

[Mr. Svinlesha]

Well there you go then.  Nothing to worry about after all.  Thanks.

[Time Kitten]

The Speargrove dwarves shoved their bags in a barrel even though they were already in a stockpile and it was set to 0 barrels. You just have to be vigilant no matter what you do.

[Areyar]

did you try to dump the 'barrel-bags', then unforbid them so they get taken to a stockpile?

[Mr. Svinlesha]

Areyar :

I don't know what you mean.  But I do know one thing: I have a consistently recurring problem with stockpiles.  They fill up with items before they fill up with bins or barrels, unless they're really big.  So if I designate, say, a relatively small finished goods stockpile, dwarves will fill it with goods before they put a bin in place.  Anyone else have that problem?  How do you solve it?

About pits: it appears that a 5-z drop isn't enough to necessarily kill things.  I have several goblins, severely wounded but trapped, at the bottom of my pit.  They don't seem to be planning to die off any time soon.  I keep reading about putting spikes in the bottom of pits, but I don't know how to build spikes.  Also channeled a shaft of water to the pit, but realized I don't have a way to drain it afterwards: so if I flood the pit, I'll never be able to get to the items at the bottom.

So, I thinking of restarting.  I've gotten much further on this go than I ever have before, but problems are beginning to make themselves felt.  In particular, I have no magma, and am very quickly running out of trees.  If I start over, I'm wondering: does anyone have any tips about how to set the world-generator parameters to make magma more common, and perhaps even available in areas that also have trees?

Finally, anyone have any mod recommendations for me?

[James Sunderland]

Give your wrestlers shields, this stops them from oiling up, throwing themselves into a big hairy pile of quivering muscle and taking each other's clothes off

I threw up a little bit in my mouth.

[Samyotix]

Areyar : I have a consistently recurring problem with stockpiles.  They fill up with items before they fill up with bins or barrels, unless they're really big.  So if I designate, say, a relatively small finished goods stockpile, dwarves will fill it with goods before they put a bin in place.  Anyone else have that problem?  How do you solve it?

Erm ... build more bins early on? :-)

AFAIK dwarves will try to put one empty bin into each stockpile which accepts bins.
Once there's one empty bin in each of your stockpiles, any extra bins will be stored in furniture piles.

This has happened to me at least once in almost every fortress - ambushers drop tons of cheap narrow clothing, and/or I order 30 each of mugs, crafts, toys and instruments via the jobs menu, and suddenly the finished goods area is chock full. Once you made a dozen or so bins, things will be fine again.

[Puck]

About pits: it appears that a 5-z drop isn't enough to necessarily kill things.  I have several goblins, severely wounded but trapped, at the bottom of my pit.  They don't seem to be planning to die off any time soon.  I keep reading about putting spikes in the bottom of pits, but I don't know how to build spikes.  Also channeled a shaft of water to the pit, but realized I don't have a way to drain it afterwards: so if I flood the pit, I'll never be able to get to the items at the bottom.

yup, 5 z levels arent enough. Sometimes those buggers survive really big drops, too. flooding the pit is an option you could build like the "old school irrigation" on the wiki.

Build a chamber that holds  enough water to flood 1 zlevel in the pit with 2 floodgates: 1 in the connection to the river, 1 in the connection to the pit. now if you close the one to the river and open the other one you just have enough water in the pit for one drowning maneuver. the next thing you need is an "evaporation chamber", a big room you can let the water flow to after you are finished drowning stuff. cycle time of the system is mostly determined by the evaporation time.

about the spikes:
I think you just have to build spikes first, either at the carpenters for crap damage or at the blacksmith for a bit more damage. then you have to build a spiketrap and select the spikes you built beforehand for each trap. I think thats how it works, I never use them.

Spikes only damage stuff when they pop out of the floor or something drops on them. and since goblins can sometimes survive a drop of several z levels on top of those spikes you would need to connect the spikes to a lever.

and then when you notice you have some wounded gobos down there, you just put the lever on (r)epeat for a moment or two 

Personally I would just try to get some wardogs down there, chances are wounded gobos dont fight that hard anymore. Or just patience. I think they die eventually down there.

[LegacyCWAL]

Marksdwarves also might be able to shoot down that far.  In fact, one of my favorite things to do with gobbos that my cage traps capture is to line up the cages, link them to a lever, then use my marksdwarves as a firing squad.

[Footkerchief]

Spikes only damage stuff when they pop out of the floor or something drops on them.

From what I've heard, that part doesn't happen, they just take regular falling damage, unfortunately.

[Jay]

On the topic of bins: They will move items to bins even after the stockpile is full.
They've done it plenty for me.
Granted, it seems to take longer, but it does happen.

[Areyar]

what I meant:
If all your barrels are full of bags and you require them for another task (brewing etc), maybe dumping it will seperate the bags from the barrels.
It would be better to build more barrels in any case, but if wood is scarce...shortages can occur.

[LegacyCWAL]

One thing that seems to help with bin-using stockpiles is to mass-forbid everything and then mass-claim it all.  For some reason, that makes all your haulers rush to that stockpile and start rearranging everything which, after a little while, results in all the stuff being consolodated into as few bins as possible.  That'll free up a few bins, if nothing else.

[numerobis]

It seems that dwarves process jobs in stack order: the last job added is the first job a dwarf will take.  So, when you forbid the stuff, you remove the hauling job.  When you unforbid, a new hauling job is instantly created.  Dwarves looking for something useful to do will see it as them as the first jobs in the list, and do them before other things.